Everything for Everybody
by jeffwik
Summary: A continuation of "Everything Falling Into Place."
1. Chapter 1

Jeff Winger had a plan. It was a simple plan, and a good plan, and it was proceeding along well enough, so far. Step one, sleep with Annie Edison. Step two, purge distracting thoughts about Annie Edison from his mind. Step three, trundle along through four years of Greendale Community College and graduate with a 2.0 GPA. Step four, go back to being a lawyer. There definitely was no step three point five (sleep with Annie Edison some more) and no step four point five (sleep with Annie Edison all he wanted because he was a lawyer again and it didn't matter, he could do anything). That was why there was a step two.

But steps two through four and a half were immaterial to the matter at hand. Step one, sleep with Annie Edison. That was the plan and it was a good plan. He'd made considerable progress on that front, he told himself. Usually sleeping with a woman was a project that took no more than a couple of hours, and on Annie he'd expended a month already. But he was making progress. He'd kissed her. They'd kissed. They'd kissed some more, and the world hadn't ended. They'd kissed and every time she said they needed to stop it, but she was usually saying that while her hands were sliding up under his shirt. They'd kissed, and each time he'd suggested moving to someplace fully private and off campus, and each time she'd demurred a little more reluctantly.

The first time had been in the aftermath of his semi-disastrous presentation with Pierce, with a weird man in an ugly jacket watching. They'd kissed until Whitman had strode away, to bother someone else, and then Annie had broken it off and laughed and claimed that Jeff had kissed her just to get them passing grades in the accounting class, and he'd better not try it again, _buster_. Somewhat undercut by the way her hand lingered on his chest, and the way she'd smiled as she said it…

The second time had been a few days later, after the study group had broken up for the evening and they'd lingered, chatting about television shows they remembered from childhood and he'd impressed her by knowing the word _toyetic_ and apparently that had been enough to get her to climb into his lap… though when he suggested they relocate, she'd laughed again, more awkwardly than before, and said she knew his game, _buster,_ and he'd better not, and she wasn't going to fall for his line, which was kind of a mixed message inasmuch as she'd been in his lap when she'd said it.

After that it was more than a week before they were alone together once more. The third time was again after the end of a group study session. The meeting had ended on somewhat of a sour note when the table split almost evenly over the issue of whether _Thor_ was a good movie. As everyone filed out, Annie had pulled Jeff aside to explain that, while in the heat of argument she'd presented herself as a pro- _Thor_ partisan, she actually agreed with his complaints about it and her support was grounded largely in the thesis that the film at least paid lip service to female gaze and the concept of the Bechdel test, giving it a leg up on most action movies. Then they'd started making out because they were alone together, and it might have gone further that time had Jeff not made the strategic misstep of breaking off to again suggest relocating to someone's bed, which gave Annie cold feet for some reason. He might have done better if he'd just started undressing her, but at this point he didn't want to complete step one half-assed and on the floor of the study room. He wanted — needed — _wanted_ to do it right. Doing step one right was absolutely necessary to moving on to step two. So instead he'd suggested they relocate, again, and she'd stammered and called him buster, again, and nothing had come of it. Yet.

But they'd kissed, and she smiled when she saw him, and that was the best part of his day. Which wasn't saying much; the rest of his day was spent being a student at Greendale. And really it only underscored the importance of step two. Once step one was fully cleared, he would easily accomplish step two, Jeff was sure of it.

These and other thoughts were rolling around in his head, as he sauntered onto campus, coffee in hand. He smiled in anticipation as he swung around the corner of Borchert Hall and into the quad, where Annie would be smiling, too —

Where Annie was already smiling, he observed as he slowed and stopped. Smiling at a bare-chested hippie jackass.

Jeff's own smile vanished instantly, replaced by a sullen scowl. Without knowing exactly what he was going to do when he got there he started towards them, his pace quickening. He almost waved, to try to catch Annie's attention, but he stopped himself in time, thank God.

He dropped his coffee when he saw Annie — still oblivious to his approach, still focused on the dirty barefoot hippie — reach out and caress the shirtless idiot's bicep. She was saying something, shaking her head slightly as she spoke, but her eyes were bright and warm and focused entirely on the piece of human garbage that stood between them. Her hand lingered on his arm. Jeff's coffee was lost, completely ruined.

Jeff had never really had much of an opinion about hippies. If pressed, he probably would have declared that they, as a group, seemed happy and certainly harmless. Annie's past association with a hippie-infested pot farm had, if it had done anything, lifted hippies slightly up, in Jeff's estimation. But not this hippie. This hippie stirred a level of bile that part of Jeff — the part that _wasn't_ overwhelmed with hatred and contempt and definitely not threatened jealousy — was surprised to find he was capable of. This hippie was _punchable_. For the first time in his life, Jeff understood what 'punchable' looked like, and it looked like the back of this piece-of-shit hippie's head. The hippie had ruined his coffee.

It took an effort of will to stop. The non-overwhelmed part of him knew that there were few ways to submarine his chances with Annie Edison more effective than walking up and punching a guy for talking to her, even if that guy was a shirtless stinking potsmoking glibertarian hippie and she was _still_ touching him seconds later. He stopped, and sat down on a bench, and stared intently ahead, trying not to watch them out of the corner of his eye. Calm down, he told himself. There was no reason for him to react like this. Annie could smile at whomever she wanted to smile at, it didn't matter to him, this was the whole point of step two. It was the coffee he was really mad about anyway. Some of it had splashed on his jeans and probably ruined them. That was why he was so annoyed.

"What are you doing?"

Jeff jumped in surprise, and turned to see Abed, sitting on the bench next to him. "Nothing," he said in a strangled voice, and went back to staring.

Abed followed his sight line, more or less, and leaned forward, looking intently himself. "Is somebody hiding and you're trying to spot them?" he guessed.

"Aliens have landed and they're using motion detectors," Jeff snapped. "I have to stay motionless or they'll see me."

"Aliens?" Abed repeated.

"Filthy bare-chested aliens without shoes, reeking of patchouli. Armed with guitars and hacky sacks."

Abed looked around curiously. "You mean the guy Annie's talking to?" he asked, after a moment. "You think he's an alien? He's not an alien, Jeff. It's important to keep fantasy separated from reality."

Jeff growled, but said nothing that qualified as words. He continued to stare straight ahead, while Abed stared past Jeff, watching Annie and the hippie.

"Are they done yet?" Jeff asked after a brief period in which he stewed in his own juices.

"I guess. He's coming this way. I think he saw me looking at him," Abed declared. He waved.

Jeff grabbed Abed's hand and forced it down. "Don't —"

"Hey there, yo, 'sup, guys?" the hippie asked. Jeff didn't need to turn and look to see his genial amble. The hippie sounded as punchable as he looked.

"Just sitting and staring," Abed answered.

"Sittin' and starin', I been there," the hippie said with a chuckle. Jeff had never hated dropped g's as much as he did in that moment.

"Stay cool, guys! Have fun! Good luck." The hippie walked past them both, out of the quad. Jeff couldn't help taking him in, then — up close, he seemed even more shirtless and more barefoot, somehow. Boyish, twenty-five at the outside. Tiny nipples and callused feet. Guitar, sure enough. Ugly purple beaded bracelet…

Jeff had a sudden vision of Annie and the hippie, rolling around naked in the grass together, lying entwined in one another's arms, Annie shyly tying the bracelet around the hippie's wrist, the hippie tying a matching one around hers and declaring that they were married in the eyes of mother nature, or some bullshit like that. He fought off a rising urge to vomit.

"It's time for class," Abed said, rising. "Unless you're skipping because of the alien invasion? In which case I'm willing to skip too."

* * *

He wasn't skipping Spanish, just because he'd seen Annie touching a hippie. That would have been ridiculous. Jeff briefly considered skipping Spanish for a totally unrelated reason — his car was just about due for an oil change, and there wouldn't be a line at the quick-lube place on a weekday morning — but no. That would be letting the hippie get to him. It was ridiculous, this unexpected rage and bile. It wasn't part of the cool Jeff Winger persona he'd so carefully cultivated.

So he sauntered into class a couple of minutes late, Abed on his heels, determined to act like nothing had happened, because nothing had happened. Annie could touch whatever hippies she wanted, it was none of his business. And he sat in his usual spot, the one he'd moved to, the one in front next to Annie, because there was no reason for him not to and it was closer to the door than the back of the class anyway.

"Look at the cool guy, sauntering in all late like a cool guy," Annie said to him by way of greeting. He nodded, saying nothing, not because he was upset but because it wasn't a comment that merited a particular response. She gave him a little half-smile — maybe it was more muted than the smile he'd gotten the morning before, but what of it? "Did you see Señor Chang in the hallway, or…?"

Jeff shook his head no, noticing for the first time that their instructor wasn't already in the room. "Has he —"

He broke off suddenly, startling in his seat alongside most of the class, interrupted by tinny hip-hop. Chang was standing in the doorway of the classroom, holding a boombox. Jeff wasn't familiar with the song but the main gist of it seemed to be that the singer was mad at his girlfriend for cheating on him, and the singer's vengeance would be biblical in scope, plagues of locusts and murder of firstborn sons and a rain of blood.

Chang stopped the tape (prompting a double take: yes, it was a cassette tape, something Jeff hadn't seen live and in person in years) as he marched to the front of the classroom. "Children, children, children," he said sadly. "Yesterday I stood here, looking at you, and all I saw was potential. You could be the next president." He pointed at Troy. "Thanks, Obama, am I right?" Chang turned away, and pointed at Pierce. "And you, you could host a radio show about how much you hate him. And so on. But today I look at you and I see animals. _Animales_!"

"What's that mean, animales?" Troy whispered to Abed. "Is it like tamales?"

"One of you monsters stabbed me in the back and you didn't even have the courtesy to do it to my face! You come here, into my classroom — _el guarido del Tigre Chino_ — and you dare look me in the eye and say 'thank you Señor Chang for being such an excellent teacher,' but…"

"I didn't say that," Annie whispered to Jeff. "Did you say that?"

When Jeff didn't reply she glanced his way, seeing him staring resolutely at Chang and obviously not ignoring her joke like some kind of petulant child, because that would be ridiculous.

"Hey!" Chang snapped his fingers in Annie's face. "Eyes on me! I'm ranting, here!"

As soon as Annie swiveled her head back to face him Chang continued on as though the interruption hadn't happened. "But in secret one of you plotted against me. Plotted against me… with _this_!" He brandished a small slip of paper.

Everyone in the class leaned forward and squinted, in ragged unison.

"It's a crib sheet!" Chang cried.

"Oh," said basically everyone in class, again in ragged unison. They all leaned back.

"I found this on the floor yesterday, in the aftermath of a very fair and well-written exam that entertained even as it quizzed! Written on it — all the stuff from the end-of-chapter review pages from the textbook! Ay Kay Ay _what you were being tested on!_ One of you is a cheater."

He paused, for dramatic emphasis.

"One of you is a cheater, and you all get zeroes!"

The class erupted in protest. Jeff forced himself to react, as his grade was on the line. He cleared his throat. "Señor Chang, we all respect your authority—"

At the back of the class Britta snorted and giggled, inappropriately.

"But it seems unfair to punish the entire class for the crime of just one person. If a crime was committed at all. Maybe what you found was someone's notes—"

Chang scoffed. "It's labeled _Cheat Sheet Top Secret Destroy After Test_ at the top."

"And maybe that was someone's private joke," Jeff suggested. "But regardless, the whole class, with one possible exception, studied hard and took that test honestly, and we deserve our barely-passing grades."

"Spoken like a cheater trying to weasel out of punishment," Chang said with a sneer.

At the back of the class Britta had her head down on her desk, hands interlaced behind it, as she quaked with silent laughter.

"Please," Jeff said irritably, "if I was going to cheat I wouldn't use a crib sheet. A crib sheet is basically just note-taking and note-taking is basically studying."

Chang glared at Jeff. "Maybe you're just fervently covering up your own crime. Maybe the guilt is getting to you. Eating away at you. Ruining your marriage." His voice was low and menacing. "Your wife says you aren't the man she fell in love with any more, and you have nothing to say to her. You shudder through each day, the lies weighing you down. Just getting out of bed feels like a major accomplishment, your only accomplishment of the day. Nothing tastes good any more. Your wife tries to help you and the only way you can respond is by pushing her away, hurting her, and you hate yourself for that. Liquor dulls the pain but doesn't kill it. You can't sleep. You take it out on your students and you feel a little better, but it's fleeting. The pain comes back, worse than before. Your wife leaves you and you're glad she's gone, it's better for her this way, but that doesn't stop you from slashing her tires. Then it's four in the morning and you realize you're playing golf in your front yard, just sending balls _woosh_ up the street with a six iron…"

"What?" Jeff asked, perplexed.

"I'm fingering Winger," Chang announced, pointing at him.

At the back of the class Britta guffawed, despite the half-dozen people sitting near her all trying to shush her. ("Quit being high!" Pierce hissed at her from one seat over. "Or at least share! It's very rude!")

"What?" Annie sat up straight in her seat. "You must be joking."

"Oh, are you saying you were colluding with him?" Chang asked her. "That's what it sounds like you're saying!"

"If Jeff was going to cheat he'd just copy off of me," she protested. "Not that I'd let him! But, come on…" She gestured towards Jeff, who was glaring at her and Chang and the world in general. "He is way more likely to try to peek at my test paper and claim he was looking down my shirt than he is to write out a crib sheet."

"I'm wounded," Jeff muttered. "I'd peek at your test paper _and_ look down your shirt, you know that."

"Well, we've got our cheaters," Chang said, clapping his hands at a job completed. "Winger and Edison. You two get zeroes, everyone else's grade stands."

"This is absurd. You have nothing remotely like proof!" Annie glanced at Jeff, who hadn't moved, and shot him a _do something already_ look, which he steadfastly ignored. With a huff she turned back to Chang. "I'll go to the dean," she said, her jaw set. "You think I won't?"

At the back of the class Britta was slapping her desk now, letting out barks of laughter between sobs. "I did it!" she shouted. "It was me!"

* * *

Annie caught with Jeff just after class. "Hey, what's up?" she asked, because of course she didn't see any conflict between smiling at a hippie and being Jeff's friend. And of course she'd noticed the change in his attitude towards her immediately, because either she was attuned to him or (and this was more likely) he wasn't as subtle as he liked to think. And _of course_ of course she would just come right out and ask him, because of course she was…

"Annie!" someone called from across the quad. Jeff didn't need to look to know it was the hippie.

She stiffened, because she didn't need to look, either. "Hold that thought," she told him, as if he'd said something, as if he hadn't just been standing there scowling and berating himself for caring that she'd been talking to the hippie.

"Let me just say unequivocally that it's fine," Jeff began.

"Hold that thought, I said!" Annie snapped, a little defensively, and spun on her heel. "Whatever you think, it's not that!" she called over her shoulder as she hurried off towards the hippie, who was waving at her. At both of them.

Jeff turned away, because there was no way he was going to stand there and watch the hippie slobber all over her, and almost walked into Britta.

"Jeff!"

"What?" He looked up to see Britta, wide-eyed, staring intensely at him.

"Jeff!" she cried, for at least the second time.

"What?"

Britta grabbed at where his lapels would have been, if he'd been wearing a suit. Realizing her error, she quickly pulled her hands back from his chest. "I need lawyer advice. You're a lawyer, right? I need lawyer advice."

"It's called legal advice." Jeff scowled. "And I'm not currently a lawyer, technically, but I can refer you to someone who, unlike me, is allowed to bill your parents —"

"Ugh! C'mon!" Britta scowled petulantly. "Chang wants to give me a zero for the test I cheated on. There's got to be some way I can get out of that!"

He sighed. "Well, my first thought is that you should stop referring to it as the test you cheated on, because there's no evidence you cheated."

"I did, though. Chang found my cheat sheet, weren't you paying attention?"

Jeff's eyes narrowed and he forced himself to focus on the idiot girl in front of him and not Annie and the hippie. "I was paying attention. I remember Chang finding someone's study sheet with someone's private joke at the top of it," he said. "I remember Chang leaping to bizarre conclusions. I remember you joining in the madcap spirit of the moment and claiming you were responsible for the cheating that no one actually proved happened. Clearly you were not serious."

"Wow," Britta said, impressed. "I should write that down and say that at the trial."

It took an effort of will for Jeff not to wrench his eyes off of Britta and back towards the quad. "Trial?" he asked, through gritted teeth. This was good, this was distracting. "There's a trial?"

"It's this whole thing." Britta shrugged. "Chang says, anyway. I don't know. The dean and other people, this afternoon in Borchert Hall, at three o'clock, and I don't know." She threw up her hands. "I don't know!"

"Perfect!" This was ideal as a distraction from the whole hippie thing that wasn't even a thing. "Where is it? And what time? I'll act as your lawyer."

"Oh, uh, didn't I just say? Borchert Hall, at three?"

Jeff nodded, as he kept his eyes on Britta and not on the slow-motion car crash that he could just barely see out of the corner of his eye. Kissing? Was Annie kissing the hippie? Why would she do that? It was difficult to not turn his head and confirm that what he'd perceived hadn't been kissing at all, but Jeff gritted his teeth and powered through.

"Jeff?"

He blinked. "Hm?"

Britta looked askance. "I don't know if that's allowed. And anyway, I mean, I'd appreciate the help, but… would you be expecting… anything…? Like, is this a gas-ass-or-grass situation?"

"What?" Jeff's line of thought was fully derailed.

"I mean," she said anxiously, "I can't get you any weed, not right now."

"That's fine," he assured her. "I don't want any. Why are we talking about this?"

Britta wrinkled her nose in a way that might have been cute if someone else had done it. On her it just looked childish. "And no offense, but you're… how old are you? Like forty-five, fifty?"

Jeff stared at her for a second.

"Oh, God," she said, embarrassed. "I was way off, wasn't I?"

"Little bit."

"Yeah, okay." Britta nodded. "Which part, though? I mean, was I wrong about you being in your fifties or about you wanting to bang me? Or both?" She cringed. "It was both, wasn't it?"

"Yeah."

"That makes sense." Britta bit her lip. "Can we just forget this conversation ever happened?"

"I'd prefer that," Jeff told her.

"Speaking of wanting to bang you…" Britta grinned, and might have winked.

Jeff raised an eyebrow, and might have responded with confusion, had Annie not suddenly stepped into his field of vision. "Hold that thought, I said…" She glanced back and forth between Jeff and Britta. "What?"

"Nothing!" Britta cried gaily. "Jeff is going to be my lawyer at my trial this afternoon, is all."

"Oh." Annie sounded nonplussed. "Good?"

"Not her lawyer, Colorado law requires that I not present myself as…" Jeff sighed. "Fine, lawyer, it doesn't matter."

"And I'm _not_ banging him," Britta assured Annie.

"Oh." Annie sounded even more nonplussed. "Good to know?"

As Britta walked away Jeff turned to Annie and shrugged. "The case against her is basically garbage. I mean, it's a piece of wastepaper."

"Except she confessed."

"Which we can get thrown out," Jeff said confidently. It was good to have something to focus on; he hadn't thought about Annie and the hippie once in… dammit, he'd just thought about them again.

"Listen, I don't want you to get the wrong idea," Annie said, her voice low and urgent. She glanced around, as if concerned about someone overhearing. "Yes, Vaughn's my ex, but I've made it very clear that it's over. We're just friends. Barely friends."

"The hippie's name is Vaughn?" Jeff snorted. "I would have expected Sunflower or Periwinkle or Moondancer or something."

"I didn't even know he was coming here, but apparently me leaving was a wake-up call, and… he just needed some advice on his courseload." Annie frowned. "I know how that sounds, but trust me…"

"You don't need to explain anything to me," Jeff told her. "We're friends, right?"

Her face lit up. "Yes! Exactly!"

"Just like you and the hippie are friends."

Her face darkened again. "No, no."

"It's fine, you can do what you want. Obviously." Jeff took a step back. "Why even care what I think?"

"Jeff, ugh, you're being ridiculous!" Annie took a step towards him. "You know full well —"

Panicking, Jeff sought an out. " _I_ know full well?" he repeated incredulously. " _I_ know?"

"Now you're doing that thing where you pretend you're offended so you can storm off —"

"Oh, am I?" Jeff scoffed, then checked the time on his phone. "I'd love to stay and explain to you why you're wrong, but I have a class to get to."

As he strode away, Annie called to him that he didn't have a class and she knew his schedule, but she didn't chase after him.

Good. Dammit.

* * *

Dammit. No, good. Fine. Whatever. Let Jeff think whatever he wanted! It didn't matter to Annie what he thought, after all.

Dammit. Stupid Vaughn.

Annie was tempted to run after Jeff and explain that _no_ Vaughn was not the same kind of friend that he was. Jeff was the kind of friend that you looked forward to seeing and you liked the way he made you smile and you liked making him smile, too. Vaughn was the kind of friend where you sort of vaguely wished them the best but you never thought about them and you didn't have any desire to see them or spend time with them and when they ambushed you on the quad before Spanish class you had to smile and pretend to be happy to see them even though you were mostly just annoyed because they presented a possible delay in seeing your friend — _friends_ — of the kind that you liked. The kind that, when they moved in for a hug unexpectedly, you had to keep at bay by grabbing their arm and holding them back, smiling like an idiot the whole time because of stupid social convention that made it so that women in public _had_ to be smiling and putting men at ease all the time and Annie had internalized those lessons so well that her first instincts were still to abase herself by smiling and she usually ignored those instincts but not always and this was all her mother's fault, really.

Stupid Vaughn.

* * *

Jeff spent the next few hours trying to figure out how to avoid apologizing. Maybe they could just let the matter drop, and get back to their very slow dance towards the bedroom — he figured they were on track to sleep together sometime in 2016, at their current rate. But more likely he was going to have to bite the bullet and admit that seeing Annie smiling at the hippie had hit him harder than he had any right to be hit. He stood staring moodily out over the parking lot, mulling. Was he upset because Annie had smiled, or because she'd been keeping him at arm's length and this hippie seemed to have insinuated himself closer to her? Was there a way he could rationalize being jealous without sounding like an idiot?

He lost track of time so badly he nearly missed Britta's trial.

* * *

At quarter past three Britta stood, alone, in the natatorium where a tribunal of professors and administrators had convened to judge her cheating. She'd been standing there for twenty minutes, and was beginning to regret her dramatic refusal to sit down in the face of injustice.

"Can't we get this over with?" asked the English professor who kept leering at her. His accent made him sound smart, but that was about all he had going for him. And he wasn't an English professor even though he was an English professor, which was weird and probably done on purpose just to trip her up. "I've got a very important appointment with a very large bottle of very cheap Scotch, which I pronounce with a capital S, because I'm not a barbarian."

"I agree!" Chang slammed his fist down on the judges' table. "I wouldn't have agreed to this stupid court procedure thing if I had known it was going to take this long. Let's just do it already!"

"Listen, he's coming," Britta lied. "I just need, like, five more minutes. I've texted Jeff, and he says he's on his way!" This was completely untrue and Britta liked to think of herself as honest, but this was important and the chances of her being caught were slim. She hoped.

"When did you text Jeffrey Winger?" The reedy dean, sitting between the English professor and Chang, pointed at her with a pencil. "Because I've been watching you for the last ten minutes."

"She probably has one of those implants," Chang muttered darkly. "They have them in Japan — you just think the text, and it happens, and you get a bill from Ma Bell."

The dean frowned. "Ma Bell in Japan?"

"Uh. They texted for me!" Britta pointed to the bleachers at the edge of the natatorium, where Troy and Abed were sitting. Abed held a handmade BRITTA IS OKAY sign, Troy a printed and somewhat weathered WE SUPPORT THE TROOPS sign, with AND BRITTA hastily scrawled along the bottom. Britta cupped her hands and called to them. "Jeff is coming, right guys?"

"Jeff's coming after all? Great!" Troy called back. "I thought he wasn't going to show!"

The dean sighed. "Goodness knows I'm willing to wait for Jeff Winger, but this is beginning to seem excessive. And the obvious dishonesty on display here?" He gestured to the space between Britta and Troy. "Not doing much to make me feel very benefit-of-the-doubt-y."

"It was all a funny joke!" Britta cried desperately.

"What was?" the English professor asked. It came out _wot wuz_ and she might have laughed at that under different circumstances.

"The whole thing!" Britta tried to remember how Jeff had phrased it — he'd made it sound so plausible. "I was being madcap!"

"Madcap when you cheated or madcap when you confessed?" asked the dean.

"Both!"

"So you admit you cheated?"

"But only in a madcap way!"

"Cheating during a manic episode is still cheating," the dean told her sadly. "Believe me, a lot of Greendale's students suffer from various depressive disorders, and we've got very clear guidelines in place."

"All right, so, the blonde girl is guilty, she gets a zero, done!" The English professor clapped his hands together. "Now let's all go get shedded, yes?" He looked Britta's way. "Are you twenty-one, perchance? Before you answer, let me just say I happen to have a bottle of Scotch and a sofa in my office, both of which I'd be willing to share—"

"Ian!" snapped the dean, as Britta gasped in horror.

"What?" the English professor asked huffily. "She's not my student and I waited until this trial thing was over—"

"Be that as it may, there's no excuse for —"

"Objection!"

Jeff Winger stood in the open doorway of the natatorium, his arms spread like Moses. Everyone else fell silent, as he commanded the room's attention.

"Objection," he repeated firmly as he strode to Britta's side. "My client has been denied proper counsel."

Britta allowed herself a small triumphant fist-pump.

The dean's eyes narrowed. "Are you her lawyer?" he asked, indicating Britta with a pencil.

"To the same extent that you're her judge," Jeff said, "yes I am."

"Oh, come on," protested Chang. "He's late! Ian clapped his hands!"

"I did, yeah," the English professor agreed. "Sorry, Jeff."

"Now, now," the dean said sharply. "I'm sure we can spare a few moments for Mister Winger to hose us down with the warm foam of his rhetoric, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I missed lunch today and my blood sugar is just all over the place."

Chang groaned. "Stupid sexy Winger," he grumbled.

Jeff nodded the decisive nod of a man who'd just decided there was no point to asking what he'd missed. "Gentlemen of the judge's table," he began, with practiced verve. "Britta Perry is not a great student. She isn't even a good student."

Britta, stung by his harsh words, let out a _meep_ of indignation.

"I'm going somewhere with this," he told her in an aside, then cleared his throat and resumed the oratory. "But just because she made the choices that led her to Greendale…"

He trailed off, suddenly. The dean, Chang, and the English professor all leaned forward a little, confused. Maybe it was all part of the presentation, Britta thought hopefully, but her heart sank when she followed Jeff's sight-line and saw what he'd seen: Annie and the dishy bare-chested guy from the quad, ducking into the back of the natatorium. Britta tried to decide whether Annie was there to support her, like Troy and Abed, or if she and the shirtless dude had come in thinking the pool area would be empty and they could make out.

Jeff had plainly gone through the same thought process and settled on the latter option. Which Britta wasn't sure she disagreed with, considering the way Annie had reddened and dashed back out as soon as she'd seen Jeff, with the dishy guy still following her (what was so hot about Annie that all these guys were into her?).

"Britta… Britta…" Jeff stammered. "She's… what's she been accused of, really?" It sounded less like a rhetorical question and more like he'd genuinely forgotten.

Britta hoped for some kind of turnaround, but Jeff's mind was plainly elsewhere. Finally the dean cleared his throat. "All right, well, I appreciate the attempt, Jeffrey, but we've eaten into the next period too much already. The zero stands."


	2. Chapter 2

Annie Edison had a problem. Annie had a lot of problems, actually, too many to easily categorize, much less count. Vaughn had started… not _stalking_ her, exactly, but he was befriending her friends and taking classes at her community college and generally getting underfoot. He'd been doing it off and on ever since the day he'd appeared on campus, first ambushing her in the quad in the morning, and then that same afternoon she'd been on her way to the pool for Britta's trial and he'd shown up _again_ which was really irritating. She remembered turning red with embarrassment, when Jeff had seen the way Vaughn kept trailing behind her.

In the last couple of days Vaughn seemed to have finally gotten the message that it was over, but Jeff still… ugh. Jeff, who was a whole category of other problems all by himself, had clearly been rattled by her ex's sudden appearance. For days now he'd been acting hot-and-cold, and she didn't have time to take him and kiss him and hold his hand and tell him she liked him, even if…

Ugh. Bleah ugh argh. He'd been doing it off and on ever since the day he'd appeared on campus, first ambushing her in the quad in the morning, and then that same afternoon she'd been on her way to the pool for Britta's trial and he'd shown up _again_ which was really irritating. She remembered turning red with embarrassment, when Jeff had seen the way Vaughn kept trailing behind her.

In the last couple of days Vaughn seemed to have finally gotten the message that it was over, but Jeff still… ugh.

Jeff was a whole category, leave it at that.

And then there was Britta, who was following her across campus. It was a typically busy between-classes crowd scene, and if Britta had been acting normally Annie wouldn't have even noticed she was there. But instead the teenager creeped in her shadow, and kept ducking behind things and hiding and crouching, whenever Annie turned her head.

Finally, just outside the campus bookstore, Annie couldn't take it any more. She spun around just as Britta was exposed, halfway through executing a dash from just around the corner to behind a nearby water fountain. "Britta!"

Britta froze. Then a rictus grin settled on her face, as she decided to brazen it out. "Annie, hi, wow, I really like your…" Britta trailed off, briefly scanning Annie's wardrobe from head to toe. "Shoes?"

"Thank you," Annie said automatically. Then she cleared her throat and gave Britta an expectant look.

Britta seemed to understand Annie wanted her to explain herself, because she paled slightly and leaned against the water fountain for support. "Okay, yeah, um, yeah. Hold on, give me a second. Um. Okay, yeah."

Annie tilted her head slightly and silently counted to five.

"You know how I got a zero because I cheated on Señor Chang's exam and now I'm failing Spanish and Jeff tried to talk to Chang and the dean and the other guy about it but they decided to give me a zero anyway?" Not waiting for Annie's acknowledgment, Britta pressed on. "I asked Señor Chang, is there anything I can do to make it up, like extra credit or something, and he was like, why should I give you extra credit when you're a cheater, and I was like c'mon Señor Chang everybody makes mistakes and that kind of draconian thinking is totally a red state kind of thing and I thought you were cooler than that, and he was like, I'm plenty cool shut up, and I was like, so can I get some extra credit, and he was like no, and I was like, I don't want to have to take Spanish 101 again next year, and he was like, I didn't think of that I don't want to have to deal with you any more than I have to, so he decided that if I paid the extra credit fee he'd let me do an extra credit project and my parents were _way_ too excited about the idea of me doing extra credit so they were happy to pay?"

"Sure," said Annie, because it was easiest.

"So the extra credit project that I'm doing is a Mexican Halloween party, _Dios Los Muertos_ ," Britta pronounced the words carefully, "and to get full credit I have to throw a _successful_ party, Señor Chang said, and then he winked at me which was kind of gross but then the dean said that the school couldn't handle another lawsuit about that so Señor Chang said fine whatever just throw the damn party, is what he said, and so now I'm throwing a Mexican Halloween party for extra credit in Spanish class?"

"Sure," Annie said again.

Britta closed her eyes and braced herself for what was coming next. Annie found herself staring at the younger woman's blonde dreadlocks and wondering whether any of the choices she'd made in her life would have looked so ridiculous to an objective observer. Yes, there was the whole series of missteps that had been high school, and the better-forgotten year she'd spent more or less homeless, and the pot farm, but her hair had always been if not kempt then at least reasonable… Annie almost made a face, and upbraided herself for being overly judgey. Britta's heart was in the right place.

Britta cleared her throat. "Sometimes?" she began, her voice quavering, "Not often. Hardly ever, but every now and then… sometimes? Sometimes I try something and it doesn't go well. Like I make a tiny little excusable mistake that unfortunately ruins the car wash because they needed soap, or… or I only look away for a second but the rats get loose and start pooping in the closet, or like that?"

"Aw," Annie clucked sympathetically. "Wait, what?"

"I need you to come to the party, okay? You'll come to the party, right?" Britta gripped Annie's sleeve and tugged at it.

"Me? Why do you need me—"

Britta made a noise halfway between a laugh and a yelp. "You're the coolest adult I know," she said. "You got tear-gassed and you were married and divorced and you dropped out of high school and you lived in New York —"

"Not in that order," Annie observed demurely. She was a little flattered despite herself; even Annie Edison was only human, after all. Then she did a double take. "Wait, married? I was never married —"

"Okay, sure," Britta said quickly, holding up her hands. "My point is I need the party to be a successful party, and with you there it'll be great, and without you it would suck."

"Aw," Annie cooed, the bit about her being married already forgotten.

"Plus right now I only have Troy and Abed as definite, and Starburns is a maybe, and if I say you're coming then Jeff will come and then Pierce and Shirley, so…?" Britta made a _come on_ hand gesture. "Please?"

Annie sighed. "I think if you think that Jeff is going to decide to go to your party or not based on whether I'm there —"

"Oh!" Britta cried out, raising her hand. "I forgot! Vaughn is coming, too! You know him, right?"

Annie abruptly lost her train of thought. "Vaughn?"

Britta nodded eagerly. "You know, the really hot guy who plays hacky shirtless in the quad? Sometimes he plays his guitar shirtless in the quad? Or ultimate, shirtless in the quad?" Her eyes grew a little brighter with each repetition of _shirtless in the quad_. "I've seen you with him. I saw you together at my trial that was a big waste of everybody's time."

Annie's eyes narrowed. "Did you tell Vaughn I was going to be there?"

"What? No. Maybe?" Britta seemed on the verge of panic, suddenly. "No. No, he doesn't know that I know you. I was afraid to — you just haven't come up in, like, the flow of conversation…" She looked away. "Maybe you shouldn't come," she thought aloud. "If Vaughn sees you, he might…" Britta trailed off with a glance in the general direction of Annie's chest.

Understanding dawned. "Ah." Annie tried to think of a way to explain to Britta that she and Vaughn had as much chance of getting back together as North and South Korea unifying. Less, really, when you projected history far enough out. "That's really not something you need to worry about, I promise…"

"I'm not worried," Britta said defensively, "I mean, there's not… Vaughn and I were… talking, behind the gym, and it, uh, we were just talking…"

"Oh, Britta." Annie sighed. Either Britta was ineptly trying to pretend she and Vaughn hadn't been smoking pot together, or she was trying ineptly to pretend she and Vaughn hadn't made out. Annie hoped it was the former, for several reasons, chief among them being she didn't like to think that a man she'd been in a relationship with for any length of time would stoop so low as to seduce a naive nineteen-year-old. It didn't seem likely… although Vaughn was, what, two years younger than she was? Three? So just maybe…? _On the one hand, it was great that he'd finally gotten the message and moved on, if that's what was happening, but on the other hand… Britta, you could do better._

The teen set her jaw decisively. "You should come. If you being there isn't, I mean…"

Best to be on the safe side. "You've convinced me," Annie said. "I will come to your party." If she was reading into things and Britta wasn't hooking up with Vaughn, it'd be great to get evidence firsthand.

Britta practically bounced. "Can I tell Jeff?"

"If you think it'll help."

* * *

After the events of the last few days, Annie was ready to get away from drama and back to what was important: learning Spanish and getting an A in Chang's class, in aid of securing inexpensive college credits she could transfer to someplace she wouldn't be ashamed to graduate from. In theory the study group should have been a bastion free from the Vaughn-related irritations that had been gamboling at the edge of her consciousness all week, but in actual practice, not so much.

Item: Jeff was still being weird. He'd been avoiding her all day, she was pretty sure, and when she slid into her seat next to his, he didn't do the usual thing where he glanced up from his phone and made a deniably flirty comment about/to her, then smirked when she responded. Instead he remained focused on texting… someone.

Item: Pierce was on some kind of youth-culture appropriation kick, trying to prove to himself or somebody that because his generation had invented counterculture (not true) he had some special claim on the trappings of left-leaning political protest (also not true). This mainly involved playing anti-Vietnam songs on the keyboard and making improbable claims about his encounters with a variety of cultural figures, most of whom had died before Troy, Britta, and Abed were born (John Belushi, Eartha Kitt, Jim Belushi, Mama Cass, Elvis Presley). He claimed to have beaten Ken Kesey in a drinking contest, then acted disgusted when none of the younger students recognized the name.

Item: Britta was all gooey over some new guy ( _please not Vaughn please not Vaughn_ ), though it was far from clear whether this supposed relationship was real or merely an invention aimed at making Troy jealous. She kept starting to talk about her mysterious new maybe-boyfriend ( _please not Vaughn please not Vaughn_ ) and then suddenly she'd break off, as though mindful of saying too much. Whether this was having its desired effect on Troy was hard to say. He did seem to be listening when Britta spoke, which was a definite step up from a few weeks ago, in the Troy-paying-attention-to-Britta department.

Item: Abed and Shirley probably had their own things going on. Abed was wearing a pirate costume for some reason, and Shirley was carrying around a sack of flour like it was a baby, despite already being a mother of two. Annie didn't ask. She already had enough on her plate.

"Chapter three," Annie said for something like the third time. "Have we all — has _anyone_ else read chapter three?"

"I've been way too busy to read chapters of Spanish," declared Britta. "Physical education, if you know what I mean?"

"Was that innuendo?" Abed asked no one in particular.

"Barely," grumbled Shirley.

"I mean I've been — well, I shouldn't say…" Britta eyed Troy, who was doggedly flipping back and forth between the first page of chapter three of the Spanish textbook and the glossary in the back. "It's just that I've had other stuff going on lately." She suddenly straightened up. "Oh! That reminds me, everybody's coming to Mexican Halloween, right? The party? I sent you all evites? I talked to you and you and you—" Britta pointed to Annie, Troy, and Abed in turn. "Jeff? Pierce? Shirley?"

"Not interested," Jeff said without looking up from his phone.

Annie rolled her eyes. She leaned over, about to murmur something deniably flirty and enticing, when Pierce spoke and she utterly lost her train of thought.

"I think Vaughn and I have plans."

"What? No way!" Britta gushed. "Vaughn's coming! I know Vaughn's coming! He promised!"

Annie and Jeff let out simultaneous groans of resigned contempt. Jeff looked up in surprise, either because of Annie's groan or because she was already leaning over and so her groan was basically into his ear.

"Hmm," Pierce said, with exaggerated dignity. "Probably that's the plans we have, then. Mexican Halloween."

Jeff was looking irritated and/or alarmed. "What, you don't want to see your hippie?" he hissed at her.

"How many times do I need to tell you, he's not my hippie—" she hissed back.

"Whatever, it's not any of my business and I make it a habit to avoid learning about people's personal lives," he grumbled. "Learning about people's personal lives is the first step on a ladder that leads to helping them move. You can do what you want. Who you want."

Something about the pained way he glanced at her before going back to his texting — and the fact that he appeared to have been texting random letters and symbols — gave Annie pause. It dawned on her for the first time that maybe Jeff wasn't merely annoyed because he didn't approve of her choice of (former) lovers, but that he really was actually jealous. That he presumed Annie had done anything but rebuff Vaughn's advances — that she had any interest in seeing anyone besides… she caught herself before she finished the thought. Annie had no interest in seeing anyone at all. And it wasn't any of Jeff's business. She owed him nothing in the way of explanations or defenses. "It's not like that," she heard herself say, despite this resolve.

Meanwhile Pierce and Britta were bickering about whose hippie Vaughn was, with Troy, Abed, and Shirley all offering their opinions. Britta's claim was the more plausible, everyone at the table seemed to agree.

"First of all, I'm not jealous," Jeff muttered to her.

"You are!" Annie grinned, despite herself. "You're actually jealous!"

"I'm plainly not."

"You are the jealous-iest jealous-er who ever jelled an us," Annie declared.

"No, because if I wanted a half-naked barefoot idiot —" Jeff broke off, then started again, more loudly so everyone at the table could hear. "The Incredible Hulk wears the same amount of clothing, did you think about that? He at least has the excuse of gamma radiation killing the part of his brain that makes good fashion choices."

"Jeff's right," Pierce said, "Vaughn plainly isn't interested in impressing schoolgirls with crushes —"

Britta let out an affronted gasp then, not having anything to follow it up with, repeated the gasp a couple more times.

"I'm not jealous of you," Jeff whispered to Annie. "If I wanted to sleep with an idiot, I could do that. There are plenty of idiots around. And they're enrolled at Greendale, which means they have a history of poor life choices, which would make it a gimme."

Annie tried not to be amused, but it was hard. "Well, I know you're not jealous of me," she said carefully. "You're jealous of Vaughn. Jeff is jealous of Vaughn," she announced to the group.

"Gay!" cried Pierce. He chuckled. "I'm kidding of course. Really it makes sense for you to be jealous but Jeff, I'll always be your best friend, even if you aren't mine any longer —"

"What, I envy his confidence in his body that lets him walk around like that?" Jeff drew himself up in his seat, as if to make himself even taller.

Annie leaned closer to him. "You think Vaughn and I—"

"Because he's not even in that good a shape, not when you—"

"Jeff!" Annie reached up and snapped her fingers in his face, cutting him off. She glanced around the table — in the moment, Annie commanded the entire group's attention. Awkwardly she scooted her chair closer to Jeff's and craned her neck to whisper in his ear. "Vaughn is nothing to me. Yes, we were a thing for a while, but that's completely over and done with. He spent a while chasing me around and I was very firm with the no, which I was trying to make clear at the time…"

"What are you doing, whispering?" asked Pierce. "That's very rude!"

"What, you can't hear her?" Troy asked Pierce in feigned surprise.

"What?"

Troy rolled his eyes. "I mean, I knew old people's hearing was bad, but…"

"I can hear her fine!" snapped Pierce.

Shirley shushed him, grumbling something about wanting to hear.

Jeff, meanwhile, seemed to have forgotten that they had an audience. He scowled, his enormous brow furrowed. "Listen, you don't need to say anything," he said, leaning down towards her. "You can live your life; I'm…" He paused to take a breath. "I'm fine—"

Annie scoffed. "Clearly you're not!" Their eyes met, inches apart — her tilted upward, him stooping — and they both fell silent.

"I am not some old man!" shouted Pierce. "I am young! I am vital! I am woman, hear me roar!"

And the moment was broken. Annie felt equal parts relief and disappointment. If she wasn't careful, she was going to do something she'd regret, though in the moment she wasn't sure which she would regret more: sleeping with Jeff, or passing up her last chance to.

Jeff cleared his throat, no doubt building up to some kind of demand that she clarify what, exactly, she wanted from him. To cut him off Annie made a show of pulling back from him and turning to the rest of the group. "Spanish?" she suggested.

* * *

The party was the next night. For the first time in years Annie had to make a decision about her Halloween costume. Option one: no costume. Easy, comfortable, cheap. Would be against the spirit of the party and thus undermine her genuine determination to support her friend Britta in her need to throw a good party. Option two: the rat costume currently in an acquaintance's garage. It was heavy and face-concealing and intended for union protests, but it was clean and she knew for a fact she could adjust it to fit. Not easy to see out of, not comfortable. Option three: something that brushed up against the idea of sexy. Not slutty, Annie Edison didn't do slutty — but festive. Cute. Cute was the operative word… she had a skeleton bodysuit. It might send the wrong message to someone. It might send a message to Jeff. If he thought his presence had any impact on whether she'd attend the party, or how much she'd enjoy it, well, he had another think coming.

But refusing to wear a comfortable, good-looking, theme-appropriate costume just because Jeff Winger might think she looked hot in it? No. Annie wasn't going to give him that power. Skeleton it was.

Never let it be said that Britta Perry's party decorations were anything but half-assed. The study room had been done up with orange and black crepe banners for the occasion, and the tabletop strewn with plastic bats (and some plastic fish, squid, and shrimp for some reason). A paper pumpkin had, apparently, dangled from the ceiling at some point, but it had slipped off the string and fallen to the carpet by the time Annie arrived.

The evite had said the party would go from eight until question mark, so when Annie arrived at quarter after, she'd expected to find it in full swing. Instead, Shirley, Troy, and Abed (dressed as Harry Potter if Harry Potter was a woman with a sack of flour in her lap, Eddie Murphy circa _Raw_ , and Batman, respectively) sat at one corner of the table, playing cards. Chang (in a surprisingly elaborate toreador costume) lounged on the sofa in the corner with a book of word searches. Pierce (Beastmaster) and a couple of other students hung around the punchbowl, furtively sipping their drinks. Their expressions were open enough that they might as well have been wearing _I Spiked the Punch Ask Me How_ t-shirts. Pierce's friend, the one with the star-shaped sideburns, was doing an especially poor job of concealing a plastic baggie of some kind of pills.

Whatever. Annie of once upon a time might have been intrigued, but modern-day Annie had zero interest in taking back-alley amphetamines. "Hey, guys," she said to the card-players as she bent down to pick up the pumpkin. "Where's Britta?"

"She and her friend stepped out to get some air," Troy said without looking up. "Her stupid boyfriend with the guitar."

"We don't know that," Abed said, also without looking up. "He might be helping her rehearse for a play, or faking a relationship."

Troy glanced up, as Annie tried to reattach the pumpkin to the ceiling only to have it fall again immediately. "Faking a relationship?" he asked.

"Really common thing, if sitcoms are anything to go by." Abed drew and discarded — they were playing gin rummy, Annie realized. "First they pretend to be a couple and then they realize they aren't pretending."

Troy's eyes widened. "That happens?"

"No," Annie assured him. "Only on television."

"All these stories have a basis in the truth of human interaction, Annie," Abed declared solemnly. "Otherwise why would we tell these stories?"

"Because people aren't real imaginative when it comes to needing an excuse to have a couple of attractive white people make out on camera," grumbled Shirley. "Fake dating, ugh. Why would people even do that?"

Abed set his cards down and started ticking off possibilities. "Make a guy jealous. Make a girl jealous. Impress an old friend or rival from high school. Satisfy visiting parents. Green card. Fulfill the requirements of a wealthy relation's bequest. Keep up appearances for work, like because someone's making a big presentation to a _family_ company and that someone can't be seen as a single swinger. Magical spell—"

"In the real world, why would people do that?" Shirley corrected herself.

"Sometimes one person in the couple convinces the other person to go along with it, because they say it's necessary for work or a green card or whatever, but really they're trying to set up a situation where the fake dating will become real dating," continued Abed. "But the classic is when the protagonist gets the love interest to fake-date them in hopes of enticing a secondary love interest, and it works, the secondary love interest becomes interested in the protagonist, but meanwhile the protagonist has figured out that it was the love interest they were interested in all along, because —"

"Hi, everybody!" Mercifully, Abed's lecture was cut short by the appearance of Britta, who sashayed in wrapped in some kind of gauze. Sexy mummy, maybe? Annie wasn't sure. It was less sexy, more mummy. Her slightly dopey smile hinted at what she'd been doing that kept her from her own party. "It's great you guys all came to my party, which as everyone can see is completely a real party and a hit —"

Chang scoffed loudly without looking up from his wordsearch.

"So I get the points right?" Britta grinned at Chang. "Right, Señor?"

"What?" Chang finally glanced up and glared around the room. "No, this sucks, you get a zero —"

Britta groaned. "But I paid the extra credit fee! You mean I have to throw another party, to —"

"Oh, no. No, no, no." Chang scowled and threw his pencil and book of word searches down to the floor. "We're not going through this again!"

"So I _do_ get the credit, or not, or…?"

"Whatever." Chang folded his arms and settled in on the couch. "Let's just wait this out, everybody."

"Okay…" Britta seemed nonplussed. She glanced around the room anxiously, then brightened up as a thought struck her. "Dancing! We should be dancing!"

As she watched Britta trawl around the room, trying to entice partygoers onto their feet and out onto the impromptu dance floor (aka the open space between the study room table and the door), Annie heard movement behind her. She turned, and saw Jeff, wearing an outfit that barely qualified as a cowboy costume and was mostly just a slightly tighter-than-usual Western-cut shirt and a hat. "Did I miss any of the trainwreck?" he asked her quietly as he stepped close.

Before Annie could respond Britta began making another announcement. "Okay, dancing. Dancing is huge, we all need to dance — that's like the number one Mexican Halloween thing!" Britta waved her arms around empathetically. "So to start off the dancing, can I get a certain very special guest, the coolest guy here, to come up and join me in, um, dancing?"

Jeff sniffed the air. "She could have warned me," he muttered as he started towards Britta.

Annie grabbed his arm. "Psst!" she pointed to Troy, who was rising slowly to his feet and making a show of stretching.

Jeff grunted in a way that suggested he was more annoyed than relieved not to be the coolest guy there. Annie tugged at his arm, intending to whisper something clever into his ear, when Britta spoke again and she lost her train of thought.

"I'm talking of course about the one and only Vaughn Miller!"

And then he was there, smiling and saying something about thanking Britta, and looking everyone in the room in the eye in turn, except for her, and the music was playing and he was dancing with Britta and she was sliding her arms around him and his hands were on her and…

* * *

Jeff found her on the steps outside. Or more likely he'd just followed her, since he'd been right there when she'd turned and wordlessly walked out of the party. Seeing him and his expression of equal parts concern and frustration did little to improve her mood.

"You don't smoke, do you?" Annie asked him. "I don't smoke, which is why I don't have any cigarettes, but if I smoked this would be a great time for one. I used to smoke, so I know what I'm talking about."

"You all right?" he asked her, ignoring her question, which she already knew the answer to anyway so it wasn't like that was a thing. "You were a little…" he made a so-so gesture, "in there."

"I'm fine."

"You want to get out of here? I mean, we showed up, which was all Britta asked, so —"

"I'm fine," Annie snapped, more harshly than she'd meant to but then again Jeff suggesting they go to an off-campus location was basically Jeff propositioning her and she wasn't in the mood for that, not just then. Then she saw the hurt look in his eyes; ugh, that wasn't fair to him, he probably hadn't even been thinking that. "I'm fine," she said a third time, more gently.

"If you want me to beat up the hippie, you don't have to say anything," he offered.

She smiled. "Jeff!"

"You can't tell me he doesn't cry out for some kind of jackbooted thug response." The glint in his eyes and the tightness of his smile marked his words as serious-not-serious. "I mean, I missed the '68 Chicago convention because I hadn't been born yet, but if I had—"

"I don't want you to do anything to Vaughn," Annie told him firmly, ignoring the small thrill of knowing that Jeff was indeed totally one hundred thousand percent jealous. She cleared her throat, and tried to move on. "It… I know how it looks, I just panicked and ran out of the room when I saw him and Britta making out, but… it isn't really about Vaughn."

Jeff's smile grew slightly tighter. "It doesn't really seem that way from my perspective."

"I was just thinking about…" The words tumbled out of her. "Ten years ago I was basically Britta, you know? And a guy like Vaughn came in and swept me off my feet and I wish I could blame him for some of the bad choices I made at the time but I didn't meet him until after I'd already dropped out and run away. I was just reminded of what a mistake that was, of all the stupid things I did and the time I'm not going to get back and I don't want Britta to make the same mistakes but that's hardly relevant because she's not screwing up her life, at least not the way I did — she's actually in school, after all. And if she wants to be with Vaughn, well, I can't exactly fault her taste."

"I can fault her taste. The man's the human equivalent of Vegemite." Jeff scowled, his false smile finally breaking. "He's a garbage person."

"Jeff, you don't even know him…" Annie paused, and almost chickened out, but made herself push forward. "And you have no reason to be jealous."

"I'm not jealous!"

"Okay." Annie took a deep breath. "I like you," she said. "And I do not like Vaughn. So you really don't need to be jealous, okay? And you really don't because… I have this plan. I'm going to be here at Greendale for two years, and then I'm going to transfer to CU Denver and graduate and, you know, start the life I should be a solid decade into having already. And there isn't any room in the plan for a guy. I know me, I know that if you and I… I know that this would be a whole big thing."

Silence hung between them for a few seconds. "It wouldn't have to be," Jeff said, his voice oddly strained.

"I know me." Annie shrugged, an apologetic smile fixed in place. She also had an idea about him. It was always possible she was wrong and he could have a one-night stand with a woman whose name he knew… But even so, Annie knew herself. "I'm really glad to have you as a friend, you know that? You're like the least crazy person here."

"Shirley is probably the least crazy person here." His tight, forced smile was back.

"Shirley invited me to a pool party that turned out to be a baptism," Annie said. "But seriously, I kind of feel like I've been jerking you around a little, and you deserve better than that. So, I'm going to take this opportunity to say that it's not going to happen."

Another long pause before Jeff responded. "Okay, buster."

"I know I've… I'm serious, Jeff. You should find some other idiot with a history of poor life choices. Or maybe set your sights a little higher." Annie swallowed, but it was true: someone who was available was definitionally higher on the scale than someone who categorically wasn't. "I hear the statistics professor is cute."

"You're not serious." Jeff stared at her, aghast, and Annie forced herself to keep that steady, apologetic smile through sheer force of will. "You are serious."

"I am serious." Somehow she managed to speak without her voice cracking.

"Well, okay, then." He scowled and his forehead seemed even larger. "Message received. I hear you."

"We're still friends, though, right?" Annie's voice did crack a little, then.

"What?" Jeff was too preoccupied to notice. "Of course we're still friends. Christ. I'm not going to…" He took a step back and looked at her, eyes narrow and hurt. "Christ. Of course we're still friends."

Annie was suddenly certain she was making a mistake she'd regret for years, and she opened her mouth to protest and take it all back… and then Troy was standing in the open doorway to the library. "Hey, dummies? I hate to interrupt your sexual tension or whatever, but Pierce is asking for you."

* * *

In the brief period she and Jeff had been out of the room, Pierce had, apparently, suffered a psychotic break and built a sort of nest in the center of the study room. Annie stared at the heap. Tables had been turned on their sides and used to support a row of chairs on which two desks had been stacked, with couch cushions wedged between to make a fort. It looked like it might collapse at any moment — couch cushions were not intended to be load-bearing. "He's in there?" she asked Troy.

Troy nodded. "Yeah, he was saying that death wasn't going to steal his glasses, I dunno. He also said he'd only talk to Jeff…"

Jeff marveled at the outsider art cushion fort. "What is this?" he asked no one in particular. "How did he do this so fast? This would take a sane person hours, except a sane person wouldn't try."

"He was mixing booze and pills," Annie guessed, recalling Starburns's baggie. "I've seen it before. Don't mix booze and pills, Jeff." She reached for his hand without thinking, and drew back at the last moment.

He didn't seem to notice, but then, he wasn't exactly looking her in the eye. "No plans to." Jeff walked slowly around the structure, which was already leaning precipitously. "Pierce!" he called. "Can you hear me?"

"No!" Pierce's voice was surprisingly loud and clear, but then, he was only a few yards away from them, separated by fabric and wood.

Jeff pointed to a small crawlspace, the only way into the interior of the fort. "All right, I'm going in." He glanced around. "Don't everyone try to stop me at once."

There was an uncomfortable pause, as Troy, Abed, Shirley, and Annie all weighed the pros and cons of speaking up. Annie was about to bite the bullet and reassure him, when Shirley intervened. "You can do it, Jeff," she told him. "You and Pierce speak the same language: self-centered white boy."

"Uh huh." Jeff shot Annie a peevish glance, and she responded with an apologetic smile.

Solemnly he removed his hat and handed it to Annie, then dropped to his knees and crawled into the fort. Annie watched him go, acutely aware of the way his butt was pointed directly at her.

She stood there with the others in awkward silence, looking at the weird nest Pierce had built, for perhaps a minute. Partway through a clearly high Britta stumbled in, apparently seeing the nest for the first time. Annie noted without judging that Vaughn appeared to have left, and while she wondered whether Britta and Vaughn had gotten high together, she didn't feel even a brief twinge of jealousy at the thought. She'd wasted too much time getting high already.

Whispers filtered through the furniture and cushions, but they were too faint to interpret. Finally, Jeff and Pierce emerged — and as Troy helped Pierce to his feet, the teetering nest finally collapsed in a tremendous clamor.

Chang leaped up, woken from where he'd been dozing on the sofa (the sole piece of furniture Pierce hadn't co-opted). He looked around and marveled at the heap of twisted chairs and scattered pillows. "Damn," he said. "I missed something fun. This party got awesome at some point…"

"So I get an A?" Britta asked excitedly.

"Don't push it," Chang told her.

"All right," Jeff said, "let us never speak of this again."

"You're my best friend, Jeffrey," Pierce told him.

"Aw," murmured Annie. She looked away quickly, trying not to blush — she'd just told Jeff she wasn't interested, after all. That she was already regretting that, well, that was a problem. But then, that was nothing new. Jeff Winger had always been a problem.

* * *

Late that evening, Shirley, Abed, and Troy wrapped up their card game.

"So where do the white people stand?" Shirley asked as she packed her knitting back up. "Abed?"

Abed was shuffling and reshuffling the deck. "Jeff and Annie are still a few inciting incidents from sleeping together," Abed declared. "Britta and Pierce, I'm starting to think that ship isn't going to sail after all."

Shirley rolled her eyes. "Uh huh."

"What about Britta and the hippie?" Troy asked with as much casualness as he could muster.

Abed shrugged. "Too soon to say. Could be she's just trying to make someone jealous." He didn't look up from his shuffling as he spoke.

"Jealous?" Troy looked up. "Why would anyone be jealous? For someone to be jealous they'd have to be interested in Britta, which, nobody is, right? Because she's… Britta, you know? So who could be jealous? You're being crazy, Abed. Jealous! Ha!"

Shirley hummed suspiciously.

Abed was still shuffling. "Hmm, maybe," he said carelessly. "Annie and Britta femslash may just be wishful thinking on my part, with no canon support."


	3. Chapter 3

Jeff Winger had a problem and her name was Annie Edison. There had been a simple plan: sleep with her, move on, do his time at this purgatory called Greendale Community College, and put it all behind him. But she kept complicating things. First she'd hemmed and hawed about sleeping with him, despite cooperating enthusiastically when it came to rounding the bases as far as second, halfway to third. Then, just when he had been about to decide once and for all that it wasn't worth it and if she couldn't make up her mind already he would just let the matter drop, she'd very firmly declined to sleep with him. Then she kept being absurdly pretty and smart and good-natured and his friend. He found himself fantasizing not just about sex with her, which was old territory in re fantasies, but about some kind of relationship. About a world where they weren't just a couple of people who'd slept together or friends with benefits, but where they were sleeping in the same bed most nights. Where they factored one another into every significant decision. Where it was an unspoken assumption that they'd spend part of each weekend together. Where they went to IKEA together and looked at rugs.

He'd been someone's boyfriend before, of course. He wasn't a sociopath. Sometimes when you were with a woman and she wanted to call you her boyfriend you were better off going along with it. Sometimes you felt obliged. Sometimes you were willing, in a reluctant sort of way, to give something a half-hearted try because it seemed like the way things were supposed to go. But he'd never _wanted_ to be someone's boyfriend before. He'd definitely never wanted to be someone's boyfriend when he wasn't even sleeping with that someone. Jeff was in murky waters.

Three months ago, he hadn't met Annie Edison. Jeff in some ways envied that younger man, who didn't know what he was missing. By contrast the Jeff of the present knew exactly what he was missing, had kissed and held and fondled what he was missing. That was the problem, really: lack of completion. If they'd just slept together back before he'd started all this fantasizing, then it never would have happened and he'd have moved on already. Or if there'd been something wrong with her, something that put her off the table besides just her own inclinations, then Jeff was sure he wouldn't have fallen down this rabbit hole. If she'd been already married or a lesbian, if she'd been nineteen or forty-five. There should have been some backstop, some terminal thought that prevented him from ranging out so far with his fantasies. There should have been something to stop him from wanting Annie Edison.

The worst part was the way Annie — no, the worst part was the way they weren't having sex. The second-worst part was the way Annie didn't seem to mind or notice or miss his hands on her, the way he missed his hands on her. She was still just as flirty and as friendly and as impossible to ignore as she had been back when the air had been so pregnant with the possibility of a janitorial-closet hookup that their friends had complained.

Weeks after that Halloween declaration — delivered with a level of finality that couldn't be gainsaid — Jeff Winger had to man up and face facts: the sleep-with-Annie-Edison part of the "sleep with Annie, move on" plan was never going to happen. He should focus on the second part.

Annie would approve. She'd taken to asking him, every so often, whether he'd asked out the statistics professor. And he'd respond, every time, that he wasn't interested in the statistics professor. And she'd explain that by dating 'the statistics professor' she meant dating basically anyone who wasn't her. And he'd say that he wasn't interested in dating.

He was, of course, still human. Over the course of the last month he'd picked up three different nervous divorcees. None of them had wanted anything more from him than reassurance that they were still capable of attracting a man's interest, or that they too could step out on their ended marriage the way their former husband had, or just that they could have a good time. One of them hadn't remembered his name the next morning, which had irritated Jeff because he felt he'd made a special effort in staying all night. She and one of the others hadn't tried to give him any kind of contact information. The third had entered her phone number into his phone when he'd foolishly left it where she could grab it, under the name Mercy, which Jeff had no idea whether that was a first name, last name, nickname or simply an open offer any time Jeff felt he needed someone's tender ministrations.

Three hookups in five weeks wasn't well below Jeff's batting average, but he'd become choosy in his dotage. Mercy and her two dopplegangers had all three been fair-skinned, with long dark hair, slender and under five foot four.

At no point had any of them suddenly broken off and smiled and called him _mister_ or _buster_ or _buckaroo_ or anything along those lines. Still, closing his eyes and thinking of England was better than nothing.

Mostly it was better than nothing.

Annie cornered him in the hall one morning in early December. Smiles and pizzazz leaping at him from behind a bank of lockers as he turned a corner, hands clasped together in what she had to know was a pose straight off the cover of a particular kind of supermarket romance novel, the sweet young thing staring adoringly at the dark stranger who was about to upend her life…

Jeff resolved to hit the bars and find a fourth barfly that night, even if it was Monday. Maybe he'd call up some mercy.

"Jeff!" Annie said, with slightly forced enthusiasm, "have I got a deal for you!"

"You want to offer me sex in exchange for my Spanish notes," Jeff guessed.

Her slightly-forced smile warmed a bit (that was the other thing, she didn't get annoyed and push him away when he flirted with her, which he'd kept doing after she gave him her firm no because on some level he wanted her to angrily rebuff him, instead of grinning and laughing at his jokes and touching his arm). "Not quite. Brace yourself. Are you ready? Jeff, are you ready?"

He nodded, which apparently wasn't good enough for Annie as she grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him close. "Are you ready?" The third time she asked it was almost a purr.

She _had_ to know what she was doing to him. If he didn't enjoy it so much he'd have shoved her back. "What is it?"

"Debate!"

"What?"

Her eyes were bright and shining. "Greendale debate club! You and me, versus City College, tomorrow."

"Is this just an excuse to be close to me?"

She scoffed with mock irritation and swatted him lightly on the chest, then took a step back so they were no longer in kissing-close proximity.

"No!" Annie rolled her eyes. "This is not about spending time with you. If I wanted to spend time with you, I would say 'Jeff, let's spend some time together.' Like I have done! Many times!"

"To be fair you've never used those specific words," Jeff said with a smirk.

She glared at him. "The way they do debate here, I need a partner. It's a two-person thing, and I need a second body."

"You need my body."

"Are you five years old?" She seemed to be trying to sound disgusted, rather than amused, but couldn't quite manage it.

"It's okay. I'm not going to make you say you need my body. Because I… actually, no. Say you need my body."

"I could get someone else," Annie said, folding her arms. "I could get…" She glanced around. "Leonard."

"Hard pass," Leonard interjected from down the hall.

"Shut up, Leonard!" Annie yelled at him, over Jeff's shoulder. "I saw you at the Girl Scout stand! Those free samples were one cookie per customer!"

"Their stated policy was ambiguous at best!" Leonard called back.

Annie turned her attention back to Jeff. "Or Garrett," she continued without missing a beat. Or Fat Neil. You know he's actually a really good guy —"

"Yeah, I know that," Jeff said a little petulantly — he didn't like that the topic of conversation had shifted away from how much Annie needed his body. "I know Neil. We —" He broke off suddenly.

Annie cocked her head. "You what?"

Jeff glanced around to confirm no one was eavesdropping. "We talk Dungeons and Dragons," he said in a low voice. "He plays Dungeons and Dragons."

" _You_ play Dungeons and Dragons?" Annie's face lit up with delight she was no longer struggling to conceal. "That's adorable," she told Jeff, affectionately stroking his arm. "You're a lawyer, you play dee-and-dee, you're basically ideal debate club material. I'm amazed you're not already signed up."

He made a sour face that barely hid his own amusement. "I don't play D&D, I just… never mind."

"You're just a big handsome dork, you know that?" She smiled up at him.

"You're just trying very artlessly to manipulate me, you know that?" Damned if it wasn't working, though.

Annie licked her lips. "Debate, Jeff," she whispered. "Debaaaaaaaate…"

"And yet somehow I'm managing to resist this siren call. Maybe because it's debate, and I'm not in high school, and I'm not a nerd."

"Which is a shame, because I really need the body of a nerd. A nerd's body. I guess that's not your body…"

"Much as I admire your ability to avoid saying you need my body —"

"I'll get Abed to do it, I guess," Annie said with a toss of her shoulders. "Anyway, have fun not debating."

She turned to walk away, very slowly, and of course Jeff fell into step next to her before she'd gone more than a foot. "Abed? You don't want Abed as your debate partner. Abed doesn't know how to create and manipulate emotional connections to win over judges. He's a human computer, and you're already set for memorization, I'm sure."

"Hmm, yeah." Annie put one finger to her chin in a thoughtful pose. "Maybe Britta."

"You can't be serious. Unless the debate topic is legalization."

"Troy, then."

"Troy doesn't do the reading for his class on picture books."

"Shirley?"

"Shirley's busy. Don't bug Shirley with this. She's got two kids and she's going to school full-time already."

"Pierce?"

Jeff stopped walking, and just stared at her.

Annie gave Jeff a long hopeful gaze. "Please?"

Jeff broke and looked down at his shoes. "Fine," he said. "But only because you said you needed my body." This wasn't true; it was because she'd done the thing with the eyes, but she didn't need to know that. He would have done it even if she hadn't done the thing with the eyes.

Annie scoffed. "I did not say that!"

"It was implicit."

"No, I — okay, that's fair." She smiled. "It's tomorrow night, so we have tonight to study."

"Hey, you never said study. Debate is arguing. I used to argue for a living. I don't need to study."

Annie cleared her throat. "Jeff, I need your body. Let's spend some time together…"

Jeff chuckled.

"Tonight, while studying for the debate tomorrow. Deal? I'll meet you at…" Annie broke off, catching herself before she said whatever she'd been about to say. "In the study room. At six."

#

Lunch at Greendale Community College's cafeteria. The droning background noise of a few hundred colorful characters extraing it up. A sign proclaiming **Today is "Meat"-ball day!** , punctuation not edited. Annie was feeling pretty good about herself, which was no doubt why the universe sent Shirley into her path.

Not that Annie didn't like Shirley. Shirley was sweet, kind to a fault, fierce and fiercely loyal. But she was also a rock-ribbed social conservative evangelical who would vote a straight Democratic ticket to her dying days while agreeing with the GOP platform more often than not. Shirley, in other words, thought she knew better than Annie.

"I saw what you did, you know." Shirley opened their conversation as she sidled up to stand next to Annie in the cafeteria line, at lunch that day. "And the Lord saw. And Leonard, because he eavesdrops which is a sin and why no one likes you Leonard!"

"I hear my name, I perk up." Leonard's voice. Annie leaned over and saw Leonard over on Shirley's other side. "I'm like a chimpanzee that way. Also the upper body strength, ladies…"

Annie and Shirley emitted simultaneous scoffs and turned away from him. "What did I do?" Annie asked Shirley. "I didn't do anything. Definitely not anything God would take an interest in. I didn't eat oysters or ham. Do you see any ham on my tray?" She indicated the cafeteria tray in front of her.

Shirley was, however, having none of it. "Please. You know what you did, and you should be ashamed. Yanking that poor boy's leash. You know he's got it bad for you, and what do you do? You take advantage." Shirley clucked her tongue. "Sad, really."

"Take advantage? We're friends!" Annie paused to wave away a cafeteria worker's attempt to ladle some "meat" balls onto her plate. "I assume you're talking about my — our — very good friend Jeff. Who is completely aware that our relationship is completely platonic."

"He may be aware of that, and you may be aware of that, but…" Shirley reluctantly accepted a small heap of "meat" balls. "But is he really aware of that?"

"Yes! We've talked about it. We've talked about it multiple times. You and I have talked about how we've talked about it multiple times, multiple times. We're friends, we work well together and we get along, and I've suggested like a half-dozen women he should be asking out, so, you know, clearly."

Shirley harrumphed. "That boy doesn't ask women out, he picks up girls in bars. If you really thought he was going to go after that statistics professor, you wouldn't keep harping on her."

"I asked him to help me because he's well-suited to the project and because it'll be fun. Which is why he agreed. Jeff definitely doesn't expect anything else." By this point they were sitting down in a booth, across from one another.

Britta suddenly slid in, next to Shirley. "Hey, guys, what're we talking about? You and Jeff? We're talking about her and Jeff, right?"

"No—" Annie said.

Shirley broke in. "What, you think just because Annie is repeating 'we're just friends' over and over again, we must be talking about Jeffrey?"

Britta wrinkled her nose. "Is that a trick question?"

"You know he hasn't stopped wanting you," Shirley said. "I'm not saying you owe him anything—"

"Ew," said Britta, although it was unclear whether she was responding to Shirley's words or the "meat" balls on her plate; the latter seemed to be taking up the bulk of Britta's attention.

"But you can do better than taking advantage of him, Annie."

"I'm not taking advantage of him," Annie insisted. "Maybe I'm taking advantage of _circumstances_ , but — is it wrong to take advantage of circumstances beyond my control? If I find a dollar in the street, is it wrong to pick it up, just because I didn't earn it?"

"Is Jeff the dollar?" Britta asked. "And if so, what do you mean by 'earn'?"

Shirley ignored her. "That's not the situation at all, and you know that. You need to take a good long look at yourself and what you're doing."

"What I'm doing is, I'm going to have fun with my friend Jeff. And we're going to do debate."

"Why?" Shirley challenged her. Annie's confusion must have shown on her face, for Shirley looked triumphant. "Why are you even doing debate, if it's not about keeping Jeff wrapped around your little finger?"

"Debate is fun." Annie folded her arms and glared. "I had a lot of fun doing it in high school."

"I don't think that could possibly be true," Britta mumbled.

"I like having fun with friends. This conversation?" Annie rose, her lunch still mostly-uneaten. "Not fun."

"Debate isn't fun, right?" Britta asked Shirley, after Annie had left.

"Damn straight it isn't fun," Shirley said.

#

Jeff showed up promptly, at only five minutes after six. Annie had already spread across the study room table, waiting for him not with the inviting sultriness that she'd displayed earlier, but with a no-nonsense attitude and several hundred pounds of books culled from the nonfiction stacks.

"What is all this?" He felt a twinge of disappointment. Jeff hadn't really expected to find that the whole debate-prep scenario was just a smokescreen for a secret plan of making out, but he had hoped.

"This is fun. This is debate!" Annie barely looked up from the stack of photocopies she was diligently highlighting as he entered. "I've already sorted and color-coded the primary sources by authoritativeness, so start at that end." She pointed at the opposite end of the table, where a dozen dusty-looking textbooks had been stacked and marked with red, orange, and yellow stickers.

Jeff frowned. "What are we—"

She cut him off, still not looking at him. "What are we debating?" Actually he'd been about to say something like _what are we doing all this nonsense for?_ but whatever. _"_ The issue is 'Resolved: Man is fundamentally good, not fundamentally evil.' I know what you're going to say —"

"Uh—"

"And I agree, it's sexist and archaic to say _man_ is good, rather than humanity, but the asses who run this thing…" She trailed off with a sigh.

Jeff scowled. "Are we pro-good or anti-good?"

That got her to look up, at least. "We don't find out until the coin flip at the start of the debate — Jeff, did you really not know that?"

"I didn't do debate in high school! I told you!"

"Ugh." Annie threw a sheaf of photocopies down on the table in front of her unnecessarily hard and stood up from her chair. "Fine. I'll walk you through it."

Jeff was a little concerned about how tightly-wound Annie had suddenly become. This was a side of her he hadn't seen, up to this point. He circled around the table towards her. "I —"

"There's a lot," she said. She began pacing back and forth behind the study room table. "There's a lot to this and maybe we should have skipped class this morning and started immediately because I'm not sure how we can prep both sides of the debate in one night with basically no notice and you don't even know what you're doing and I haven't tried to do anything like this in a really long time and I really don't want you to embarrass me out there so _get cracking_!" This last was punctuated by her poking him in the chest with one finger, surprisingly hard.

This wasn't how Jeff had expected the evening to start. "Annie, it's okay, it's just a stupid Greendale thing, it's not going to affect your future…"

"I wouldn't expect you to understand," Annie said coldly, sitting down at the table. "But I'm asking you, as a friend, to actually make an effort."

"I — of course." He scowled as he sat down next to her; it wasn't cool of her to play the friend card like that. "But why? Seriously, why do you care so much about this? C'mon. You're not in high school any more, who cares about extracurriculars?"

"I know, but it's important to me!" Seeing Jeff's inquisitive expression, Annie sighed. "I only found out that Greendale had a debate club with zero members yesterday, ten minutes before I asked you to do it with me. The dean was saying that Greendale was going to have to forfeit again, and I just… I know it was a long time ago, and I don't regret the choices I made — I don't! Mostly I don't. But once upon a time I was really _good_ , you know?" She stared wistfully into space. "In high school I was valedictorian and the best at debate and I spoke better French than the teacher and one time instead of a sub for the civics teacher the principal put me in charge for a week. I was the city of Greendale's volunteer-of-the-month like twenty times in a row. I was going to go to Harvard, and then maybe the Kennedy school or Harvard Law, and by now I'd be gearing up to run for Congress. Or maybe Johns Hopkins and oncological research, so I could cure cancer. Or I'd be an FBI agent — don't laugh!"

"I wasn't going to," Jeff said honestly.

"I used to be a mathlete and the quiz bowl team captain and Knowledge Master… did you ever do Knowledge Master?"

He shook his head. "I don't know what that is."

"It doesn't matter. I mean, you're right. It doesn't matter. I'm never going to be eighteen again. I'm never going to clerk for Sandra Day O'Connor, and I'm never going to become a transplant surgeon, and I'm never going to study gorillas at the Jane Goodall Institute, and I'm never going to investigate X-Files with Fox Mulder. Those childish fantasies are over for me. I'm a burnout former social-justice activist at a community college trying to get cheap credits I can transfer to the state university, and the highest I can realistically aim is dental hygienist."

"First of all," Jeff said slowly, "I think you're being too harsh on dental hygienists. Dentistry in general gets a bad rap, but it's a solid career. And hygienists are going to have work to do until everyone in America flosses after every meal, so, there's plenty of job security, too. You'd make a great dental hygienist, and that's not true of everybody."

Annie emitted a low, mordant chuckle. "Thanks for that."

"Also you're doing a great job at selling yourself short. I'm not saying you're going to go to DC and end up White House chief of staff, but it's not like your only two options are a Nobel prize and dying in a ditch. There's a large middle you're excluding. I mean, I'm never going to be on the Supreme Court, either."

"No, but…" She sighed. "It's stupid. Once upon a time I thought I could. But, you know, there's like thirty thousand high schools in this country, and every year somebody is the top of every single one of those classes. And of those thirty thousand valedictorians there's a thousand who are crazy special only-come-along-once-every-thirty-years types, and of those thousand, one thousand super-special people every year, basically none of them dropped out from everything for ten years to get back at their mothers for not just turning a blind eye to but actively _encouraging_ their addiction to amphetamines… That's why I got you to do debate with me."

"I knew it couldn't have been because it was fun," Jeff muttered.

She nodded, a wan smile on her face. "I wanted to relive my glory days, and I wanted you to be there to watch."

"I think your glory days are still ahead of you. You're what, thirty?"

Annie rolled her eyes. "Gee, thanks. I'm twenty-eight."

Jeff shrugged, as though a couple of years made no difference. "Wait until you're thirty-five and you're busted for fraud and lose everything you thought you'd earned. I only wanted to keep my head down, you know, get through this, and you come along and I'm doing halloween parties and extracurriculars…"

"Fun parties! Fun extracurriculars! With friends!" There was an edge of forced joviality to her voice. Seeing his sour expression, however, she sighed. "We are friends, right? Still?"

"Why wouldn't we be? Do you know something I don't know? Have you been sending pictures of me to the dean in exchange for credit hours?"

"No, no, it was just a thing Shirley said… it's not important." Annie sighed. "Listen, let's just lean in and power through this, okay? You take 'man is evil,' I'll take 'man is good.' See what you can dig out of philosophy, theology, and history. Figure out the broad avenues of attack to take, and I'll do the same, and then we'll work on rebutting each other."

"Objection," Jeff said. "You're describing a scenario where, necessarily, we do twice as much work as we're going to end up using."

"Overruled. A lot of it is going to be dual-purpose."

"You're lucky we're friends," Jeff said.

"Shirley said I was taking advantage of you," Annie said.

It was several hours later. Papers and open books littered the study room table, the floor near the study room table, and the floor near the sofa, which was where they'd decamped to, ostensibly to eat pizza. The remains of the pizza lay cold and greasy in its cardboard tomb, abandoned.

Jeff sat at one end of the sofa, legs stretched out as he stared at a photocopied sheaf of papers in his hands. A few feet away Annie sat cross-legged facing him, her back to one arm of the sofa, an open notebook in her lap.

He didn't immediately respond to Annie's statement, so she extended a leg and gently prodded him in the hip with her bare foot.

"She said that, huh?" he asked wearily.

"She did, yeah. She said that I was leading you on. Dangling the possibility of sex in front of you to cajole you into doing my bidding."

"You were real clear about the no sex thing," Jeff said without looking up.

"So you don't feel like —"

He threw the papers down. "What do you want me to say?" Jeff asked irritably. "That I've changed my mind about being attracted to you? That when you and I became friends I stopped wanting you? Are we not adults?"

Annie was aghast. "So you do think —"

"No! Of course not. Christ. I'm an adult. I'm capable of having desires without acting on them. As are you. Why are we talking about this?"

She stood quickly. "Nothing, never mind," she said, not looking his way as she walked back to the study room table. "I just thought that you — if you thought — never mind."

A tense silence settled over them, broken a few minutes later by Jeff.

"I agreed to do this because you asked me to and I like you," he said quietly. "Also your description of it made it sound at least potentially fun. Which it definitely hasn't been."

"Winning is fun," Annie countered.

"I'll have to ask City College about that."

The silence returned.

This time Annie broke it. "So, you like me."

Jeff looked up, glanced her way. "Is that somehow in dispute?"

"Why do you like me?"

Jeff tossed down his papers again. "Well, for one thing, you never make transparent bids for reassurance."

"Har har," said Annie from over by the study table.

"You're stunningly good-looking and sometimes you make out with me." When Annie didn't give some biting rejoinder, Jeff glanced her way. She was leaning against the study table, head down, hands gripping the table edge a foot or so apart, her hair hanging down to obscure her face. She might have been trembling slightly. "Hey," he said, rising.

"It's fine," she mumbled, her voice thick.

"I wasn't serious," Jeff assured her as he stepped towards her. "I mean, you are _stupidly_ pretty and I like flirting with you, and kissing you, but that's not why I'm here."

She wiped at her face without lifting her head up so Jeff could see. "Then why?"

"I enjoy your company. I feel like I said that, at some point? If anything, the flirting…" He sighed. "The flirting gets kind of frustrating, knowing we're never going to —" He broke off as, suddenly, she was pulling him down to her level and kissing him.

"I know, right?" she whispered breathlessly into his ear as he tugged her back to the sofa. He fell back onto it and she fell with him, ending up in his lap. "I like kissing you too," she continued between nips at his earlobe. "Move we table the no-kissing rule."

"Second," he managed to croak out before he became too distracted to use any words at all.

#

Close to an hour later they took a break. Jeff watched Annie rise and carefully re-clasp her bra on her back, under her shirt, before pulling her leather jacket back on.

"I've been wanting to do that for a while," she said over her shoulder as she walked back to the study table. "Since the last time, pretty much."

"You're the one who —"

"I know, I know. And that was dumb. We can just do _that_ , and it doesn't have to mean anything." Her tone was oddly chipper. "We're friends, we agree on that, and anything else is just a… a bonus."

Jeff swallowed. He'd just had his bell rung, in more ways than one. Was she seriously proposing casual platonic kisses on a regular basis? Casual and platonic second base? Maybe eventually casual and platonic lovemaking? Casual sex with strangers was one thing, but there was a reason Jeff tried not to remember the names of the women he picked up in bars.

He stood, without quite knowing what he was doing. For a moment he hesitated, and almost strode to the study table, picked Annie up and threw her down onto it. But instead he turned and walked out of the room, down the hall towards the parking lot.

Annie was on his heels, of course. "Jeff?"

"Yeah, I'm done," Jeff said, not looking at her. "This is… this is not what I'm into."

"What?" She grabbed his shoulder, tried to stop him, but only succeeded in slowing him down. "I thought this was your thing. I mean, not _just_ the kissing, obviously, but —"

"I'll pass." Jeff felt more than slightly dizzy.

As they left the library building, the doors locked behind them but neither of them broke stride. "I misread things, is that what you're saying? You didn't want…?" When he didn't respond, but just kept walking toward his car, she tugged at his shoulder again. "Hey!"

"Of course! Of course that's exactly what I want," Jeff snapped. "You know me so well." He stomped away.

She stomped right along after him, of course, right on his heels, alternately begging and demanding he stop and explain. She probably would have left him if he'd told her to, especially if he'd insisted, but he didn't, he just kept walking.

He didn't stop until they reached his car. He had his keys out and his hand on the driver's side door handle, when he saw the boot.

"Crap." Unpaid parking tickets had finally caught up with him.

"Oh, that's not good." Annie wrinkled her nose and peered at the boot and dammit, she looked _delicious_.

"It's fine, I didn't want to move my car anyway. I mean, look at this great parking job I did." Jeff gestured towards his car. "Right between the lines, perfectly straight. There's no way I could ever top that."

"There's a number you can call tomorrow," she said, crouching to examine the boot more closely. "Assuming you can't just _talk_ it into opening for you?"

"Listen, I would love to stand here and make jokes with you about my crisis, but instead I'm going to call a cab, apparently." When Jeff turned and began to walk away Annie fell into step beside him, keeping pace even though he wasn't walking slowly and his legs were much longer.

"Come on, let me give you a ride," she said. He thought she was going to punctuate it with a playful punch on his arm, or a flirty squeeze, or a friendly sort of shoulder check, but instead she just looked up at him expectantly.

"Great. Thanks," he said, because saying _no I'd rather pay a cab driver_ didn't seem like it was going to fly.

"And I'm sorry I… misunderstood," she added after a pause. "It won't happen again, okay? We're friends."

Jeff sighed. "We're friends."

"And I really value that," Annie said solemnly, "and I don't want to put it at risk."

When Annie woke up in Jeff's bed she wondered, just for a second, where it had all gone wrong. In the predawn gloam she could just about make him out, a big muscular lump of a guy who looked like the snoring type, even if he wasn't doing it just then. Did he always sleep in the nude, or only when he had a woman in bed, or had she really thrown him so badly off his game? He hadn't exactly seemed thrown off his game, all things considered…

It was tempting to scoot in close and press herself against him without waking him up. Odds were good that if she moved into position and elbowed him, he'd throw an arm over her and spoon her. Spooning, skin on skin, was something Annie really missed.

But that would have been selfish, she decided. They were friends. They weren't really lovers, they were friends who sometimes had a particular kind of fun together. Staying overnight was probably pushing it. Cuddling was definitely out, no matter how tempting it might be.

And besides, it would have been a lot nicer on clean sheets which, after what they'd done, these definitely were not. Annie should instead climb out of bed and find her underwear and her clothes and her keys, and get home to change and shower and show up at Greendale as though nothing had ever happened.

Afternoon at Greendale found Annie and Jeff in the same room. Normally this would be nothing unusual, but so far that day — the day after they'd spent an evening and most of a night together — they'd been avoiding one another. Annie had skipped Spanish class, even, which she saw as a testament to just how much she was concerned for Jeff's feelings. And Britta reported that he'd skipped, too.

She'd assumed that Jeff wasn't going to show for the debate. Annie had considered skipping it herself, since after all they hadn't really prepared sufficiently the night before and Jeff was probably not going to even be there, but she felt she owed it to the school, and to herself, to honor the commitment she'd made. Plus it gave her something else to focus on. So instead of class she spent the day cramming, prepping notes and material on the topic: _man is good_. To really prepare she should have covered Jeff's half — _man is evil_ — if only to get a sense of what arguments to have ready counters for, but she really didn't have time and she didn't have the mental energy, either.

When Annie walked into the gym, she had expected there to be about five people present — the City College pair of debaters and the panel of judges. Instead there were several dozen — the dean had, apparently, offered credit hours or something for showing up to cheer Greendale on? — And that several dozen included Jeff Winger, who was already seated at the Greendale table, playing with his phone.

Annie fixed a broad smile in place as she walked calmly to their table and sat down next to him. He didn't look up.

"Hiya, buddy," Annie said quietly to him, in her cheeriest, most casual voice. "Good to see ya." She made a gun-fingers gesture at him before she knew what she was doing.

Jeff nodded slightly, but said nothing.

Despite her sudden attack of dorkiness, Annie pressed on. "Wasn't sure you were gonna make it, buddy. Good to see ya." She'd said that already. Dammit.

"You asked me to do this, so I'm doing this," Jeff's low tone spoke to a certain amount of tension he seemed to be carrying.

Annie forced herself to continue to smile. "Oh, um, yeah. Thanks again, friend-o." Dammit dammit.

Fortunately then the moderator cleared her throat. Coin flip (Annie elbowed Jeff in a _see? see?_ sort of way, but he didn't respond), and then the debate started. Fortunately, inasmuch as it meant that Annie could no longer embarrass herself trying to be casual with Jeff. Which, somehow, was more of a priority than not embarrassing herself in front of the City College debate team, the judges, and the onlookers.

When they were called on to make an opening statement, Annie hesitated just long enough to be sure that Jeff wasn't going to set his phone down and take the lead, then rose and said some words that slid out of her head as soon as she'd said them. She had to start over when the moderator reminded her, gently, that her side had been assigned the "anti" position regarding _Resolved: Man is fundamentally good_ , not the "pro" position which she'd begun exhorting.

It did not get better from there.

Finally, an hour in, after Jeff had stumbled through a half-hearted argument rebutting the eradication of smallpox by claiming the parties involved had only done it to make themselves look good, Annie'd had enough. When her turn to present came up, she took a deep breath, approached the lectern, and took another deep breath before beginning.

"You want to know why this is going so poorly for us? You want to know why we're acting so weird? Funny story," Annie declared. She popped the microphone out of its stand and gripped it like she was doing stand-up. "I've known Jeff for almost three months now. Since the beginning of the semester. He walked up to me and hit on me, and lied to me to make himself look good. And you know what? I liked it! I knew he was lying to make himself look good, but did I think oh, here's a dishonest Ronald, don't want anything to do with him? No! I was like, hey, sexy lying man, lie to me some more about how you speak Spanish! That's what the lie was about, just to clarify. Maybe not a big deal, but in the context of a Spanish class… Anyway. Somehow we became friends." She was pacing back and forth now, not looking at the judges or anyone.

"And I say 'somehow'? But basically it was because he thought I was hot and I thought he was hot and I liked him thinking I was hot. I liked him trying to impress me. Also we made out. Several times. Eventually I decided that it was bad, and wrong, and selfish. So I stopped that, and I told him that we weren't ever going to be a thing, because I wanted to feel better about jerking him around."

She paused, to let that sink in. Everyone in the gym leaned forward slightly.

"Although in my defense," Annie said after a moment's thought, "I'm not planning on staying at Greendale for very long, I'm going to transfer credits… I want to get my life back on track, and glomming onto a hot guy is not a good way to do that. It has not worked for me in the past, you know?" She paused and steadied herself before continuing. "The reason he's here at all is because I flirted at him until he agreed to do it. Last night we were talking and we were supposed to be prepping and we ended up making out, even though I said we weren't going to do that any more, because I was feeling needy and he was saying nice things — I initiated it — and then we went back to his place and had sex until we passed out, which again, I initiated, even though I said I wasn't going to, because I wanted him!" She was shouting now, waving her free hand like she was leading a political rally. "I've been selfish, I've been manipulative, I've been short-sighted. I've used Jeff — a guy I like! — I've used Jeff to make myself feel better about using Jeff to make myself feel better!"

The crowd (such as it was) had begun to murmur, and at this revelation their whispers grew in intensity. Annie silenced them with a gesture. "Jeff does not exactly come out of this smelling like a rose, by the way. He befriended me under the same false pretenses I befriended him under! We tried to just be friends! We did! Somehow we kept kissing anyway. I tried to stop, because he wasn't doing much to stop, and we managed… what, six weeks?" Annie turned and glanced at Jeff for confirmation. His forehead rested on the table in front of him, with his hands over his head, and he was rocking very slightly back and forth.

"Okay! I'm replaying what I was just saying, now, and it occurs to me that maybe I should have thought twice about airing this dirty laundry in public, but you know what? I don't regret it! Now everything is incredibly awkward and I don't have any idea where we stand, because I wasn't thinking, at all. I was just responding to base animal urges, and so was he, because _man is evil_!"

There was a wave of applause as Annie realized she was out of breath.

"Edison out!" She held the mike out from her body and dropped it to the gym floor, then turned and strode back to her seat. The applause lasted slightly longer than she would have expected for _awkward pity applause_ , which was something, maybe.

There was a delay while the AV technician fixed the microphone (apparently it hadn't been designed to be dropped onto floors), during which time Annie noted some at least halfway approving expressions on the faces of the audience and the judges. She risked a glance Jeff's way, and saw he was fidgeting in his seat and playing with his phone… except that its screen was dark.

"I lied just now," she whispered to him. "About not regretting it. Or at least, I regret it now. Sorry?"

"You apologizing to me tends to follow a certain script," he whispered back. "Now is really not the time."

Annie reddened slightly, realizing what Jeff meant. "Hey, you always accept my apology," she countered, almost but not quite smiling.

Jeff was almost smiling, too. "It's not my fault you're awesome at apologizing. Evil, wicked apologizing…"

They were busy almost smiling at each other and almost missed it when the judges announced that Greendale had been disqualified for not following the protocol of debate. Therefore City College won the gold first-place trophy and Greendale the silver second-place trophy, which led to some excited applause from the dean and the audience, because, as Annie and Jeff later learned, usually Greendale forfeited completely and got zero trophies, despite City College and Greendale Community College being the only two schools in their bracket.

Afterwards the study group wanted to take them out for second-place pizza, but there would have been questions about the whole Jeff-and-Annie-of-it-all, or whatever, and frankly neither of them were feeling up for that. Jeff in particular announced a firm desire to just get home and unwind with frozen pizza and a bottle of scotch.

His evening plans were almost scuttled when he remembered that his car was still booted. Troy and Pierce and Abed wanted to try to get the boot off themselves, but Jeff said he'd just call the police and pay the fine, and in the meantime —

In the meantime, Annie said, she'd give him a ride.


End file.
